Scott Adams of Dilbert fame, who has been revealing himself to be quite the anti-leftist of late, attacks the cult of gaia-worshipping climate activists who have been telling us constantly for over 40 years that Mother Earth is doomed, DOOMED, unless – surprise! – their favorite political platforms are enacted. And these same people tell us how terrible it is for Christians to influence politics with their religious views. What about YOUR religious views, sunshine?

At any rate, this is pretty good, just how many climate models turn out wrong, for just one to be right? Is it 50? 100? 5000? How many that might be right, today, were right 20 years ago, or will be in another 20 years? I can tell you the answer: none.

This is a sort of Occam’s Razor logic that is deadly to fantasists:

I will bet anyone $1 million dollars that I can come up with a climate forecast model that ignores C02 and still predicts the temperature 30 years from now to within half a degree. Does anyone want to take that bet?

Obviously there is a trick involved, so I won’t accept your bet for ethical reasons. But let’s see if you can figure out how I could win that bet every time.

I am 100% confident I can build a climate prediction model, using my current skill set, that will predict the measured temperature in 30 years to within half a degree.

Furthermore, you can pick whatever measurement type and place you want for the bet. My trick does not depend on doing anything clever with the measurement itself.

I can also build an accurate climate prediction model for any local geography. I can do it for the ocean or the air. And in each case, I have a 100% chance of getting the right answer to within half a degree.

Would you take the bet?………

……..how I could make a climate model that is right every time?

All I need to do is make a hundred different models, each producing output that is half a degree apart, until I have at least one model that fits every possible outcome. My models would look like this:

Model 1: Current Temp + .5 degrees

Model 2: Current Temp + 1 degree

Model 3: Current Temp + 1.5 degrees

Etc.

And I’d include all the temperatures below the current temperature too, just in case we start to cool off. In 30 years, one of my prediction models will be correct by chance. I’ll throw away all the loser models and collect my $1 million bet.

Now keep all of that in your head and take a second look at this headline. Does this model still look impressive? I’m guessing there were quite a few prediction models in the past, and lots of them now too. One of them will be more accurate than the others in 30 years.

Does that really tell you anything?

My point here is that I don’t care how many climate models are accurate if you don’t tell me how many were wrong. If 99 out of 100 climate scientists create models that are wrong, and one gets it right, would you bet on that winning model to stay right in the future?

I lived in Idaho for a year and worked at a place that, because it was such a craptastic nightmare of pollution and amazing danger, had to recruit across the entire nation to bring in a flood of new engineers to replace those who constantly left. So I wound up being a new hire working with people from Arizona, California, Michigan, etc.

Now I was actually replacing a previous UT grad who just bled “Texas is Awesome” all over the place. He DROVE 24 hours or so back home at least every 2 or 3 months. He bragged Texas up one side and down the other. After he left and they hired me, I was fairly homesick. I, too, lamented having to leave Texas and especially Austin (OK, a, it was different then, and b, I was all of 22), and probably described how awesome it was. And it drove my co-workers nuts. They kept asking me, “what’s so great about it, what’s so great about it?” I had a hard time describing it.

I think those who haven’t lived here for an appreciable length of time can comprehend the extent of the love affair many Texans – natives or transplants – have for this place. As to the why…….it’s hard to explain. Texas has its own, very dramatic, history. It was an independent nation. It is huge. The food is varied and awesome (Whataburger!). The women are gorgeous, prettier than any other state I’ve been to, though some other southern states come close. Cowboys, the oil industry, the ranching, Hispanics that have been in Texas longer than Mexico has been a nation, the huge wide open sky which some easterners used to tall trees and narrow vistas find oppressive.

It has the most varied geography of pretty much any state in the union including maybe even Alaska and California. You can be in deep East Texas piney woods that look like Alabama, the Rocky Mountains, or flat unbroken scrub brush desert. But the heart of it all, the prettiest, best part, to me, anyway, is the Hill Country. I fell in love with the Hill Country in college and have adored it ever since.

The people are generally awesome, too, but we are getting too many and the urban areas have become more and more generic Top 10 market type places. So don’t think about moving here! There’s snakes everywhere and black widows and you have to rinse the sand out of your coffee cup every morning and its hotter n’ blazes n……..

Seriously, Texas also has a deep Catholic heritage that the fading protestant majority has tried to minimize but which this video gives at least some recognition to. It’s from the early 60s and is in good color. You can see the fields of wild bluebonnets that are just about to start blooming, among the Indian Paintbrush and the Firewheel and Mexican Hat and others. There is even a brief shot of a TLM at an ancient mission in South Texas. German immigrants, of which my wife is a pureblood descendant, get a mention. Her father is one of the dwindling speakers of Texas German.

Texans I think will really enjoy this video, even though it is possibly a bit hokey and juvenile. Outsiders will lament and gnash their teeth in great jealousy. Clear streams with white limestone bottoms, oak and cedar trees, white rock cliffs and rolling coastal pastures, mountain laurels…….my wife and kids are going to Pipe Creek next week, and I have to stay and work. I know everything will be wonderfully in bloom. Waaaahhhhh!

I really like this video from Michael Matt. It makes a very good corollary to the two videos in the post below. Sort of like diagnosis, and treatment plan.

I should never like to give the impression that I am hopeless or despondent over the state of the Church. Much aggrieved, certainly, outraged, definitely, but not hopeless. I do know God will prevail in the end, and that all of this somehow ties in with a plan of Providence that may well forever elude human understanding. I also know that situations, even extremely dire ones, can sometimes turn on a dime, that what appears a hopelessly lost cause can rapidly transform into unbelievable triumph.

So I really like the last several minutes of the video below, and the exhortation to fight. I agree with Matt that I don’t know how to “define” Francis. I have read and seen some of the same things he has: that Francis is antipope, that Benedict’s abdication was null because it was made under duress, that Francis is the false prophet, that the Chair of Peter has been vacant since ’63, or ’58, or whenever. And while some of these arguments may have more merit than others, I have not – I cannot – fully embrace any of them because I. Just. Don’t. Know. Francis was elected. He sits in Rome. He is viewed by all the world as the pope. He exercises petrine powers. But he also attacks the Faith in ways never before seen, at least not from this most holy office. So what is he? I don’t know. Scary. Terrifying. A destroyer. A fool. A knave. a weak, flawed, failing man. All of the above.

All I know for certain is that he is wrong; dangerously, destructively, wrong. And I know he must be opposed. I have known that for a long time. I also know he – and more importantly the cardinals and bishops who surround his office and who can either put his policy wholly into effect, or block and undermine it – must be prayed for with passionate intensity. I have been doing that, too, for a long time.

As to whether “neo-Catholics” are “getting it,” I really have no idea. I don’t have the time to read their thoughts much anymore. I’m willing to take Matt’s analysis at face value, but I also know a lifetime of intellectual habit and deeply held belief – the pope must never be questioned or doubted, ever – is not an easy thing to overcome. So we shall see. As to whether there are portents to a mass resistance to Francis’ pontificate and the forces that elected, we shall have to wait for the future to see that, too. I a way, I pray that is correct, but what will that mean? Schism? Or simply a formal recognition of the schism that has existed for 60 or more years, ever since the modernist forces that badly influenced, if not hijacked, a council, first started to reveal themselves en masse?

It’s all a bit much for me to figure out. I shall be content to continue to do my part in bringing awareness, as Matt says, to how extremely radical and unprecedented this pontificate is. All else I leave in the hands of Almighty God, whose Will shall eventually triumph.

While much of what the priest in the sermons below presents is somewhat old news to any who have been following developments in this pontificate with any closeness, it is still extremely handy to have it all gone over in detail and explained just exactly how pernicious, destructive, and even blasphemous Francis’ efforts to wholly remake (as in destroy) the moral edifice of the Church are.

It is also very edifying to know there are priests out there – I certainly won’t ID him, but non-SSPX, traditional priests – who are calling a spade a spade and demonstrating clearly that, given the choice between “the pope and Jesus Christ,” this priest, at least, intends to side firmly with Jesus Christ.

There is much good formation here. Both sermons are well worth your time and constitute elements of a 6 part sermon that has all been uploaded to the Sensus Fidelium channel on Youtube.

Sermon one reviews the travesty that is Amoris Laetitia, and the clear “interpretations” Francis has given to bishops in Argentina, Malta, and other locales, which clearly demonstrate the revolutionary intent of this unprecedented encyclical. There are many clear judgments and hard-hitting phrases that we most certainly need to be hearing from our priests:

The second sermon deals with the reaction to Amoris Laetitia in the form of the dubia submitted by 4 cardinals asking very pointed and clear questions of Francis. As is already widely known, Francis has chosen to simply ignore this dubia. One hopes eventually the cardinals will then take the issue to the next level, which is to publicly examine Francis’ works in the light of Tradition, but we shall have to see:

I disagree slightly with this excellent priest in one area, that is in referring to this as a “real Henry VIII moment in the Church.” Elsewhere, he says more correctly, to my mind, that the Church has never, ever, in her entire recorded history had a pontiff make such direct, destructive attacks on the Doctrine of the Faith.

We are in a completely unprecedented situation. This post-modernist crisis is the worst the Church has ever seen for the completeness of the embrace of error and the tiny scope of the remnant faithful, but Francis has taken it to an entirely new and different level.

But while Henry VIII was certainly a lout, a glutton, a destroyer of religion, and a persecutor of the Church, he was, after all, a layman. He started the process of destruction of the Faith in one country and was rightly excommunicated for his crimes, but what we have in Francis is something entirely different. Here it is an attack from within, from the highest office in the Church, the man given such enormous torrents of Grace to correspond faithfully to the tenets of his office and the Doctrine of the Faith that his heart must be as hard as diamond to be executing the plan he is so obviously carrying out. Not only is the scope of destruction Francis can achieve infinitely larger than anything Henry VIII could have done, but after decades of neglect and collapse the forces of orthodoxy and resistance are so much smaller than they have been at probably any other time in the history of the Church.

To me, Francis’ destructive potential is greater than Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, Zwinglii, and all the rest combined, because he presents himself as not only within the House of God but as its head! Catholics will for decades to come be fighting off arguments from protestants, atheists, etc., based on the errors that Francis has introduced. Even worse is the aid, comfort, and intellectual armament being conferred on those modernists within the Church. Now we shall be forever quoting pope against pope in trying to defend the Faith.

And we haven’t even begun to see this play out. Francis will be gone in a few years, more than likely, but what will follow in his wake? Even if that next pope is not as radical as Francis, will he roll back any of the revolutionary changes already under way? Or will he allow them to persist and continue to rot the Church from within, as the appeasement of the use of contraception did to the Church during the 70s, 80s, 90s, etc?

The only way forward for the Church, then, is for some future pope to deliberately refute the errors abounding today and anathematize the current resident of the Vatican Doma Sancta Martha. We have got to pray that such a future pope, with enough backbone and love of Christ to do so, emerges.

On a lighter note, is not this priest a most effective, practiced speaker? Few other priests use so much inflection, emotion, and vary their meter as much as this one does.

As if you need to guess. Planned Murderhood, which exists for no other reason than to be not only the leading baby murderer in the country but also the primary advocate for keeping abortion legal, turned down Trump’s offer to fully fund them at their desired level if they would only stop killing babies. So much for abortion only being “3% of their business,” it is the one non-negotiable activity they perform, their most “sacred” satanic sacrament they adhere to:

Half a billion dollars in federal funding isn’t enough to keep Planned Parenthood from what it does best — abortions. This week, Planned Parenthood proved once again that, for all their talk of “women’s health,” their business IS abortion.

On Monday, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration made an informal proposal to the nation’s largest abortion provider: You can keep your federal funding if you stop taking the lives of unborn children.

PP refused, as abortion services are simply “nonnegotiable.”

“Let’s be clear: Federal funds already do not pay for abortions,” Dawn Laguens, the executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said. “Offering money to Planned Parenthood to abandon our patients and our values is not a deal that we will ever accept. Providing critical health care services for millions of American women is nonnegotiable.”

That’s at least the talking point. But money is fungible (as anyone who has ever handled currency ought to understand).

GOP officials, of course, promised relentlessly on the campaign trail that they’ll get taxpayer dollars out from under the abortion giant. It was an issue that found new life in 2015 after undercover videos from the Center for Medical Progress purported to show PP involved in a large-scale fetal tissue racket.

This all begs the question: If Planned Parenthood was really concerned about vital low-cost health services for women, and really thought the organization would not be able to adequately service patients without an enormous taxpayer kickback, why would it put said handouts on the chopping block for something it says is such a negligible part of its entire existence?

Because it’s all a crock……..

…….Given what the public now knows about the kind of operation that Planned Parenthood is running all over the country, and the Republican promises made to voters in the 2016 election cycle, there’s absolutely no reason that they should continue receiving a red cent of public money.

That is, if the courts will allow it. Texas’ attempt to defund Planned Murderhood was rejected by a West Texas Bush ’41 appointed federal district court judge. Texas plans to appeal, but the odds are the courts will reject Texas’ arguments that Planned Barrenhood’s non-abortion services are neither vital nor irreplaceable in the vast majority of the state. Which, of course, is a lie, but whatever it takes to keep the evil leftist sacrament of abortion viable.

This Planned Barrenhood de-funding will be another major test of both Trump and the Republican Congress. In Trump I think it safe to say his commitment to social conservatism remains mostly unproven, and in Congress decades of evidence reveal their social conservative principles to be almost entirely campaign prevarications. So I don’t expect Banned Parenthood to be defunded, but I hope and pray I will be proven wrong.